Uncharted

by Kim Brown Seely

  Our anchor float! Which marked the spot where we’d dropped the chain.

  We turned off the engine and drifted over, hoping Andy would show.

  “Having fun now, Chet?” I asked.

  He sighed, looking weary.

  “It’s not so bad, we’ll figure it out,” I said, softening.

  “Well, we’d better. We don’t have any choice.”

  The quiet was calming. A red-tailed hawk circled overhead. Finally, after twenty minutes or so, an aluminum skiff rounded the corner. Our relief at the sight of the guy at the wheel was enormous.

  “Howdy!” he called out with a wave. “You the folks who called about a diver?”

  The maneuver turned out to be tricky with just the three of us. We decided Andy would bring his boat alongside Heron, and I’d jump aboard to help him into his dry suit. Jeff would stay with Heron since it was impossible for us to anchor—without, um, an anchor on board.

  It was choppy in the bay, and a long jump…

  “Hi,” I said, landing in the bottom of the bobbing skiff with a thud.

  “Hi,” Andy said. He was about my age, late forties or early fifties, freckled, doughy. He took off his boots. Pulled down his jeans. Peeled off his socks. I looked the other way.

  “Could you zip my suit up?” he asked.

  I turned back around. “Sure, happy to,” I said. “We were so glad you could come out this morning!” I babbled, zipping the back of the thick black neoprene carefully, like a mom packing a two-hundred-pound toddler into a snowsuit six sizes too small, careful not to catch any skin in the zipper. “There you go,” I breathed.

  Andy put on his flippers and mask, lowered himself to the skiff’s transom. I didn’t envy his having to slide into the murky depths of Blind Bay.

  “Here goes nothing,” he said a few minutes later, treading water then sinking out of sight.

  I stood watching the spot where Andy had been. Pallid bubbles rose in a ring. The wind blew, ruffling the restless surface of the water. I looked over at Jeff floating on Heron, about two hundred feet away. Gave a little wave. Minutes ticked by…

  Finally, a riot of bubbles shot to the top and Andy resurfaced.

  I helped haul him into the skiff. “That’s some rock you managed to lasso,” he said, dripping, climbing aboard. “Wrapped your chain round a boulder the size of a car.”

  “No kidding,” I said. “So, what do you think?”

  Andy said he’d been able to free most of the chain so that we could crank it back on board. But he hadn’t managed to get it all.

  Ten minutes later, Andy had anchored his skiff and we’d both climbed back aboard Heron. I was stationed at the helm, an expert on the stick by now, trying to keep the boat idling in neutral and the bow centered over the spot where the anchor and chain were looped tight as a noose, we now knew, beneath a Volkswagen-sized boulder.

  Jeff and Andy were standing on the bow, scheming.

  In the end here’s what they did: pulled the end of the chain with the anchor attached back on board by rigging up a pulley system, removed the anchor, attached that end of the chain to the windlass and wrapped in as much as they could, about half, until they reached the section stuck under the boulder. We’d have to somehow cut the rest loose and leave it behind. But how?

  I watched the two of them, bonding through physics and the laws of motion. The sun had warmed the chill off the morning, and they sat in shorts on the bow, dripping sweat, chain stretched taut, trying to figure out what to do next. We were lashed to a boulder seventy-five feet down by a chain with links the size of limes. I shook my head. The situation seemed hopeless.

  “We can’t give up now, Jeff!” Andy was saying, “This is man against nature!”

  “Maybe we can cut through it,” Jeff said.

  “I don’t know, that’s one monster chain,” Andy said doubtfully.

  “Hang on a sec,” Jeff said, disappearing below. He reemerged with a pair of monster bolt cutters.

  “Where’d you get those?” I asked as he clambered by.

  Then Jeff went back up to the bow and, holding the heavy-duty cutters in both hands while Andy pulled the chain taut, tried to cut through the galvanized steel. He may as well have been trying to sever a branch with a pair of fingernail scissors. I held my breath…

  Clank. With enough pressure the cut passed through the chain, which snapped in half and dropped in two pieces to the deck.

  It was a miracle!

  All three of us stood there under the bright noon sun in the middle of nowhere, whooping and cheering and high-fiving.

  “I can’t believe you had that bolt cutter aboard,” Andy said with respect.

  “Way to go, Chet!” I enthused.

  “It’s no big deal,” Jeff said with a hangdog look, although I knew how psyched he really was. “With my luck?” he added. “I figure you never know when you’ll have to cut yourself loose, so you might as well be prepared.”

  BOYS

  “I can’t believe the boys will be here in a few hours,” I keep saying, sipping my coffee in the cockpit.

  “Yeah, our last morning before the hyenas land,” Jeff mutters, raising his mug in a mock halfhearted salute, then reading me the quote printed on its side: Every Dog Has His Day.

  Heron has four of these indestructible mugs. You also stand a good chance of getting Wake Up Sleepyhead, Wake Up and Smell the Coffee, or Rise and Shine. I’ve got Rise and Shine and, strangely, the morning feels that way, rising and shining and kind of miraculous: that we’ve made it this far, and that we’re docked at Cortes Island in Desolation Sound (after an unplanned detour to Powell River, a mill town where we’d managed to find a marine store and 220 feet of three-eighths-inch-thick braided nylon rope, which Jeff wove to the 120 remaining feet of anchor chain, solving that problem). Soon the boys’ floatplane from Seattle will appear over the bluff, circling like a stiff-legged cormorant before splashing down in Cortes Bay.

  In honor of their arrival—Sam all the way from San Francisco, where he has a week off from his summer internship; and James, who has just finished his last day managing the kayak center in Seattle before heading east to college—we are making Heron family ready. It doesn’t take long. Jeff sprays the salt off the dark blue hull and scrubs the deck. I fold down the bunk that turns the starboard office into a berth, climb up, and lie down testing it out. Hmmm…It’s hard as a board and barely six feet long. The boys will have to figure out who gets the sleeping shelf (which I attempt to disguise by tucking a Therm-a-Rest pad beneath striped sheets), and who gets the double forward berth. But oh well—someone can always camp on deck.

  Next I pull on a pair of yellow rubber gloves and attack the forward head. I hate cleaning. But the head is so compact, even I can handle it—and it’s strangely satisfying, making everything shipshape. I discover I can clean the whole thing, including the teak floor, sink, and toilet (known as the head since the days of early wooden sailing ships, when a ship’s toilet was placed at the head of a vessel, where splashing water served to clean it naturally), with a tiny sponge. This takes maybe five minutes. Ten if I go big and shine up the stainless.

  The galley is already in order, so I hang a fresh striped towel from the gimbaled stove (which swings from a pivot point and stays level so you can boil water for tea, for example, when the boat is heeled over on its side), and dig out some plums for the fruit bowl. There’s a lot to be said for the simplicity of living in a small space. It’s ironic, I think. No sooner do we obtain our dream houses than the urge to downsize sets in—much like a hermit crab longs to shed its shell. Boat space is pared-down space. And the new shell? Boundless freedom.

  Still, Heron is downright luxurious compared with the floating summer home of Desolation Sound’s most storied mom, Muriel Wylie Blanchet. With the boat in order, Jeff and I are free to relax while we wait. My husband strikes up a conversation with a couple on a boat down the dock. I reach for Blanchet’s memoir The Curve of Time, a remarkable tale by a woman who, le
ft a widow in 1927, rents out her home to earn extra money, packs her five children onto a twenty-five-foot motor launch, and cruises the coastal waters of British Columbia for fifteen years. Blanchet’s account of their unstructured days exploring Desolation Sound reads almost like fiction, but her adventures are all very real: single-handedly, she acts as skipper, navigator, engineer, and mum, steering her crew through encounters with tides, storms, rapids, cougars, and bears. Blanchet’s voice is so understated and matter-of-fact, however, that what you take away from the story isn’t the notable accomplishment of her basic survival (and how unusual her adventures were for that time) but instead the quiet self-assurance of a woman teaching her children the wonders of the natural world.

  One of my favorite parts of the book is when she describes the family’s twenty-five-foot cruiser, Caprice: “At times we longed for a larger boat,” she writes, “for each summer, as the children grew bigger, the boat seemed to grow smaller, and it became a problem how to fit everyone in. She was only twenty-five feet long with a beam of six and a half feet, and until later, when the two oldest girls went East to school, she had to hold six human beings and sometimes a dog as well.”

  As author Timothy Egan, a Seattle native, explains in his intro to The Curve of Time’s most recent edition: “They were six people and a dog on a boat of no more than a hundred and fifty square feet. Imagine being crammed into a medium-sized bathroom with your family, and you have some idea what the floating quarters were like.” But he also underscores the book’s lovely, lyrical quality, adding: “Ah, but the Caprice was merely a vehicle to the larger world.”

  * * *

  The boys call us to say their flight from Seattle is delayed, so I turn next to British author Jonathan Raban’s description of life aboard the first ship associated with these waters, the HMS Discovery, captained by British navigation legend Captain George Vancouver in 1792. “Discovery was a few inches short of one hundred feet long,” Raban writes in his terrific Passage to Juneau, describing his solo journey retracing Vancouver’s route up the Inside Passage. Raban continues:

  Cramped and smelly at the best of times…the quarterdeck—an area reserved for gentlemen of all ranks—was roughly twenty-eight by thirty feet; it was also the ship’s farmyard. One could hardly take a step without tripping over a piglet or a chicken, or colliding with a bony goat. This cluttered and constricted space had been made even smaller by the addition…[of] a glass greenhouse, 8 x 12 feet, in which newly discovered plants could be returned, alive, to England…With five commissioned officers, a dozen or so animals, and the greenhouse, the quarterdeck was already overloaded. But Discovery had taken on an unprecedented number of young gentlemen, aged from 16 to 22.

  Yikes! I think, marking the passage in case there are ever any grumblings of mutiny from our own young gentlemen. How ridiculously lucky we are, how fortunate to have been born in the twentieth century not the eighteenth century, I tell myself, imagining the cramped and reeking Discovery inching its way between these then uncharted islands, crammed with miserable livestock. Even worse, Captain Vancouver sailed the Discovery and his company’s smaller ship, the Chatham, into the area on an unseasonably dark and rainy night in 1792. Both ships felt their way through these waters in a very unpleasant navigation, as if blindfolded while trying to anchor, according to Vancouver. He and his crew of 170 men were astonished to find the water incredibly deep even close to shore. What they had no way of knowing is that Desolation Sound has the most dramatic drop in altitude from mountain peak to ocean floor in all North America, with fjords dropping away to depths of up to six hundred meters, nearly two thousand feet.

  Finally, nearing midnight, they anchored off what is now Kinghorn Island in the middle of Desolation Sound. Vancouver and his crew then spent a drizzly three weeks charting the region in rowboats. Our little “adventure” with the boys, regardless what happened, would be a pleasure cruise by comparison.

  * * *

  While getting there is slightly easier than it was two hundred years ago, what makes Desolation Sound so storied is that it has hardly changed at all: it is still a wild and undeveloped coastline dotted with islands and islets, coves, lagoons, towering cliffs and granite outcroppings, all framed by thick coniferous forest that ranges almost to the snowy peaks of the Coast Mountains. Each summer, the area receives a two-month population boost as swarms of boaters flock to the region in powerboats, yachts, sailboats, and kayaks; it’s not uncommon for a hundred boats to share a small anchorage. But since the nearest road is twenty miles south, where the Pan-American Highway comes to an unceremonious stop in the tiny fishing village of Lund, the area remains largely protected and pristine.

  Anyone who spends time in Desolation Sound will bump into Captain Vancouver. He was under orders of the United Kingdom’s Royal Navy to chart the entire northwest coast of North America and find the secret, undiscovered waterway known as the Northwest Passage. The Discovery and her sister ship, the Chatham, had already been at sea for more than two years, painstakingly fulfilling orders to survey parts of the New Zealand, Australian, Hawaiian, and North American coastlines. Finally reaching British Columbia in 1792, Vancouver and his crew explored, surveyed, and charted the entire coast, naming practically every island and channel. Today, more than two hundred years later, every bay sailors anchor in, every shore they tie to, the captain and his lieutenants were there first.

  George Vancouver was desperate to live up to his predecessor, Captain James Cook, the British explorer, navigator, and cartographer. (Cook had an impeccable reputation as a brilliant captain who was well liked by his crew. His long list of maritime achievements were legendary, including the first recorded European contact with the Hawaiian Islands, the first circumnavigation of New Zealand, and sailing thousands of miles across largely uncharted areas of the globe.) But Vancouver had been battling a mysterious illness for much of his maiden voyage as captain, and by the time the Discovery reached North America, he was prone to violent fits of rage followed by long bouts of depression. He drove his lieutenants relentlessly, often accompanying his men as they rowed the lengths of the fjords and rounded the islands from dawn to well past dusk. Needless to say, Vancouver was not well liked by his men. But he was so driven, thorough, and exacting that his charts of the North American northwest coast served as the key reference for coastal navigation, and they were still being used well into the 1900s.

  In his frustration at hitting a maze of dead ends in the deep, dark, and winding fjords of coastal British Columbia, Vancouver’s anger and depression engulfed him. Sunk in gloom and staring up at a wall of seemingly impassable mountains, Vancouver christened the place Desolation Sound. Since no roads have ever been built in the area, the name fits to this day.

  * * *

  Finally, at about three o’clock, we hear engines and look up to see a sturdy, yellow-and-white de Havilland Beaver floatplane chugging through pale blue sky. It circles once, splashes down, and motors up to the dock. The pilot steps onto the pontoon, lashes the plane to a dock cleat, and all of a sudden there are Sam and James! They unfold their lanky selves from the seven-passenger plane, grab their duffels, and lope toward us in jeans and fleece jackets, then embrace us in bear hugs. Jeff gets a dude!-how’s-it-going kind of hug. I get a mom hug, each long-legged boy bending down and folding over me like a crane.

  “Hey, Momma!” they say in unison. Then, “Hey, Dad. You guys made it! How’s life been on Heron?”

  “Oh, it’s an adventure,” I say. Adding mysteriously, “We’ve got a few good stories for you.”

  “Yeah?” James says. “So you were swamped the first day?!”

  “Mom’s doing a helluva job,” Jeff says.

  I just laugh and say, “Thank god the real crew is here!” I take them both in, drunk with the sight of them, feeling a combination of anticipation over the things we’ll share in the coming days and relief that after the whole anchor-chain fiasco and attendant delays, we no longer have to get ourselves here. With pride and
excitement, as if Heron were a new family member—which, in a way she is—we lead the boys to the gleaming hulk.

  Within an hour the brothers’ gear is stowed, they’ve worked out who’s scored the forward berth, who’s stuck on the sleeping shelf—and we’re all in swimsuits, diving off the stern into Cortes Bay. Had I forgotten in just two weeks how big they both are? Or did they just seem bigger with the four of us all together within the confines of the boat?

  They’re both over six feet—sinewy, broad shouldered, and olive skinned, with dark brows framing blue eyes. There’s a transformation in young men, a time when they have a kid’s face still, but with that sharp nascent handsomeness lurking around the cheekbones. Both boys have passed through that phase, I notice, and are now, unmistakably, men. Men with chest hair. And beards!

  “The days are long but the years are short,” people say about the early years of child rearing. I remember some days being almost calcified in their slowness when Sam was a baby. Home alone in our Upper West Side apartment, I had never experienced time so minutely. Exhausted on the bed with him after a night of breastfeeding, strapping him into his Snugli infant carrier—each trip to the corner deli as complex as a polar expedition—clipping his tiny translucent fingernails. Time moved as though through sand.

  And then, seemingly overnight, two babies, with the arrival of James just twenty-eight months after his brother, and it sped up! People were right, the years were short. Each stage of parenthood was interesting: time leaped along as legs grew longer and voices deepened and character formed, and the current stage was equally fascinating: these new adult people. They would have been irresistible to girls, had there been any lurking in the general environs. Too bad, I think, while we sit around on the stern deck wrapped in towels, drip-drying. They’re trapped in the middle of nowhere, without friends, or cars, or working cell phones, or females for miles in any direction. There would soon be girlfriends, serious girlfriends, welcomed aboard. But this last week as a family we’d have them all to ourselves.